I thought about posting this to only NANOG, but since a great concentration of beta testers of a technical/network engineering inclination are located in the Pacific NW, decided to also include the SIX chat list.
You may have seen the Starlink android or ios consumer-friendly app, which displays network traffic, uptime/downtime, and other link stats. I believe this to be polled directly from the antenna unit itself over grpc.
The beta antennas are always 192.168.100.1. If you are using your own router with the starlink beta system, in addition to its WAN interface being an ordinary DHCP client in cgnat IP space, you’ll need to manually give it an address in that /24 and set up routing to reach the .1 IP as needed.
reference: https://github.com/sparky8512/starlink-grpc-tools
reference: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcui
you’ll need a fairly normal Linux or BSD box with:
git
go
python3
pip
use pip to install grpcio and grpcio-tools
install grpcurl: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
do a git clone of the starlink-grpc-tools url above, also take a look at its readme info
get the dish’s protoset file and write it to new file dish.protoset , this is an index of all data that can be polled
cd /home/eric/starlink-grpc-tools
/home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl -plaintext
-protoset-out dish.protoset
192.168.100.1:9200
describe SpaceX.API.Device.Device
/home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl
-plaintext
-d {“get_history”:{}}
192.168.100.1:9200
SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle | python parseJsonHistory.py
output of the above looks like this:
2021-02-06T08:15:56,3600,19.92034332,14,2,0.3125,0,0,0.0,0
full CSV header for the above:
datetimestamp_utc,samples,total_ping_drop,count_full_ping_drop,count_obstructed,total_obstructed_ping_drop,count_full_obstructed_ping_drop,count_unscheduled,total_unscheduled_ping_drop,count_full_unscheduled_ping_drop
since we are able to acquire the above in a comma-delimited csv format, it’s fairly easy to write a script storing the integers from any one of those particular columns into a mariadb db, sqlite, influxdb, or whatever.
the following will output about 3.8MB of text for the full history (I believe this to be the full copy of the ring buffer stored in RAM for the terminal’s statistics) , pipe it into a text file if you want to manually look at it.
/home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl -plaintext -d {“get_history”:{}} 192.168.100.1:9200 SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle
same as the above but human readable output
/home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl
-plaintext
-d {“get_history”:{}}
192.168.100.1:9200
SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle | python parseJsonHistory.py -v
current counter: 299673
All samples: 43200
Valid samples: 43200
Parsed samples: 3600
Total ping drop: 20.03700998
Count of drop == 1: 14
Obstructed: 2
Obstructed ping drop: 0.3125
Obstructed drop == 1: 0
Unscheduled: 0
Unscheduled ping drop: 0.0
Unscheduled drop == 1: 0
see the get_history_notes.txt file for more info
SOME EXAMPLE QUERIES
these should match with what the json query is in the grpc GUI
get status
/home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl
-plaintext
-d {“getStatus”:{}}
192.168.100.1:9200
SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle
get device info
/home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl
-plaintext
-d {“getDeviceInfo”:{}}
192.168.100.1:9200
SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle
get history, this outputs a huge amount of data
/home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl
-plaintext
-d {“getHistory”:{}}
192.168.100.1:9200
SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle
The following is copied/pasted from my notes file on things we can acquire, and then use a tiny shell script with awk, sed, regex, whatever as needed to trim out just the numbers, and put them somewhere else for polling by snmp extend
/home/eric/go/bin/grpcurl
-plaintext
-d {“getStatus”:{}}
192.168.100.1:9200
SpaceX.API.Device.Device/Handle
notes on what’s what:
figures we care about to parse out and turn into just the integers
snr can never be higher than 9
fractionobstructed appears to be the percentage of the time that the view is obstructed, as long as the view
remains unobstructed, this number appears to slowly decrement over time
validS is valid seconds? i think
the S is almost likely always Seconds of time
“uptimeS”: “304439”
“snr”: 9,
“fractionObstructed”: 0.0013524292,
“validS”: 61815.74,
“last24hObstructedS”: 53
“downlinkThroughputBps”: 47915.73,
“uplinkThroughputBps”: 34980.496,
“popPingLatencyMs”: 29.266666
example of running the command above twice, the second time a few minutes after the first,
to see that fractionObstructed does decrement itself over time
first run: 0.0013524292
second run: 0.0013467998
